As I sat at the computer reading the Poem for the Day,

I thought about how it is said that poetry is to be read

aloud. The only reason I thought this is that I couldn’t

hear the words being spoken to me through the crunch

of the granola I was chewing, which I had put on a small

bowl of plain Greek yogurt to sweeten the sourness. I

was eating yogurt because I read on-line that it was good

if you have a fever blister, which I have but which is now

about gone. I don’t know if the yogurt helped, but I

am pretty sure the licorice oil and an over-the-counter

ointment shortened the unpleasant duration. I stopped

chewing and re-read the poem. The words sounded to

me like the poet must have had crunchy peanut butter in

her mouth. I stopped reading the poem and read her bio-

graphy only to discover she was known for her “clarity of

meaning.” Well, I wondered what was wrong with me so

I read another poem by her and this time I thought, for

sure, she had stolen my granola.

Since seeing the results of the midterm elections,

a man’s worst fears are being realized – the

country is inhabited, by and large, with people

like his fifth grade classmate Ralph, who is

remembered for being the kid who always

played pocket pool when he stood in front

of the class to recite something while the

teacher Mrs. Allen, never one known for

patience, yelled, “Ralph, Get your hands out

of your pants!” and he was the kid who

when asked where his homework was could

never think of another excuse and always

said, “Mrs. Allen, my dog ate it.” In terms

of Political Philosophy, does that make the

man a Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian or just

depressed?

I think if I were a citizen of

just about any other place

on the face of the earth

with the exception, per-

haps, of some remote

spot where South Amer-

ican tribes still thrive

along the Amazon —

tribes, which in bliss

don’t know anything

about anywhere else in

the world, I would really,

really resent us as the bully

we are perceived to be and

because perception is reality,

it would be my reality and

it makes me sick to see it

that way.

Braving the November chill

he ascended and descended

into the turbulent, hot waters

and stiffly reclined, water

tumbling over, under, around

his taut body working musc-

les, tendons, ligaments, warm-

ing the flesh deeply to the bone.

He reclined, the jets pounding

his back and neck. Around him

shook the gloriously bright

birch leaves in the backyard

accent lights; arborvitae branch-

es tossed back and forth, giant

pines thrashed in the swirling

wind off the Big Lake and blue

clouds blew by the full moon,

over and over and over on a

journey south? He was in North

Country Heaven and his soon-

to-turn-seventy-year-old-body

sighed in gratitude.

The author of the Poem for the Day

wrote of a guilty remembrance from

his childhood involving death. The

reader felt a pang of lingering and

still lively guilt. For the reader, it

was about being afraid of the un-

known and confusion over death

and innocently saying the wrong

thing at the wrong time and every-

one freezing in time in the reader’s

frozen folder of – the poet called it

gaffes. Then as the memory thawed

the reader felt the chill of that exact

moment in the family car as his dad

pulled up to the curb in front of the

funeral parlor to view the lifeless

(what did that mean to the boy?)

body of the beautiful, young mother

whose son sat in the front seat and

the reader as a young boy sat in

the back, who just as the engine was

turned off and the doors were about

to open and not knowing anything

about death and wondering if the

son’s young mother was still the

beautiful woman the boy had a

crush on and going into a panic

blurted out in song to the son,

“Your mother is dead; no, she’s

alive; no, she’s dead or is she

alive?” There was the huge suck-

ing noise of a gasp in the car from

the man’s mother and father and

everything and everybody froze

in time and then the son began to

cry and the man reading the Poem

for the Day all those years later

winced loudly enough for his

wife to ask, “Is everything all

right, dear?”

It was a documentary of a revival

of “A Chorus Line,” and he couldn’t

stop crying and didn’t know why.

The dog, the Chocolate Lab with the

sad brown eyes, always perceptive

to his adoptive parents’ needs,

looked into the man’s tearing eyes

as if to say, “I’m here for you.” The

man loves musicals; his mom,

who never got to see many musicals,

loved to listen to Mantovoni’s vers-

ion of classic musicals, especially the

song “Bewitched, Bothered and Be-

wildered” from Pal Joey. It was one

of the few times the man saw her happy.

They listened together, and as he re-

members, it was over his father’s pro-

testations. His father didn’t like musicals

saying they didn’t deal with reality, but

the man thinks they frightened his father’s

feminine side and, actually he had a big

compassionate, feminine side which

was hard to see, but it was there.

Well, it was the late fifties and early

sixties and his father was a Republican.

But why this? Now? The characters?

Their stories? Their vulnerability, risks,

disappointments, longings, hopes, and

all that reality in a musical? His  mom

and dad missed each other so often,

that it was like the two proverbial people run-

ning in slow motion toward each other —

arms wide open —  only to run past each other.

The glorious, but wild and

wooly

snow monkeys of Japan’s

heights,

with their four fingers

and thumbs so

much like ours as they swing

from tree to tree

and endure the four seasons

and winter as harsh as it could be

in the highest places are

99.9% like we

are; they care lovingly

for their young, but unlike we

are, their pecking order is about

arguing, fighting, and shooing away

wannabe

leaders of another day

and making up by grooming

bugs away,

but not warring, slaughtering,

obliterating, ethnic cleansing

in the dirtiest ways.

Here we have much more in

common with Chicago’s sewer

rats any day

and, most unfortunately

but predictably,

the

macaque,

the Snow Monkey

is, also, our prey.

They weren’t going

to unplug the pump

in the pond in

their beautiful

backyard

until the middle of

November,

but the day dawned

well below freezing,

so they will

close up the waterfall

for the winter,

clean the filter,

catch the birch leaves

in the net, plug in

the bubbler

bid the silent, still,

staring

goldfish adieu

until spring

shines through.

Anticipating,

he rubbed his

arthritic knuckle

and shivered a

little, too.